Performance Review – Weaving personal goals into organizational ones

Often times, setting goals for next year’s performance review takes into account only organizational goals set by the manager for the employee. This misses an opportunity to set the goals in a way that could benefit the employee’s career growth plan in the most direct way.
As an employee, you should look at goals set by [...]

What do leaders/managers give to organizations?

This is performance review time, and naturally I am thinking about what I have done over the past year as a leader/manager to warrant any reward. It is always hard to figure this out, because all the work is done by an Individual Contributor, and so it is hard to be objective when evaluating the [...]

Managing Careers

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Expectations).
This is the final post in the series, and this tackles perhaps the most important question of all: Ravi needs to help people in his team build and grow their career as they work under his guidance. However, [...]

Managing Expectations

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Work).
In this post, we are going to try answering the question: How does a manager as important as him (and holding as many resources) manage expectations from other senior managers and executives without over-committing his team or himself?
If [...]

Managing Work

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing 1-1s).
In this post, we are going to try answering the question: While Ravi is the smartest guy and the leader in the team, he is also the bottleneck. How can he manage his work (delegation or empowerment for [...]

Managing 1-1s

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Performance). In this post, we are going to try answering the question: What is the most efficient way for someone to manage their 1-1s when one has many direct reports (in my friend’s case, 9).
Effective 1-1s is an [...]

Managing Performance

See my previous post for background on this series of posts. The question we are attempting to answer is: How does someone (in this case, my friend Ravi who has 9 direct reports) set performance objectives for teams and individuals so that he does not have to spend too much time directing day-to-day activities?
There are [...]

Management Challenges

While talking to one of my friends (I will call him Ravi) who has 9 direct reports and 4 indirects (and who doesn’t have enough time to spend on each of his reports on non-technical topics), I realized that having more reports than you can handle is a serious but common problem, especially in places [...]

Joining a new team as a leader

There have been many situations when I have joined a team which has lost its leader. Here are some of the things that have worked for me:

1-1s with each team member: This is extremely useful first step that I have used in many teams with good amount of success. One of the goals I have [...]

Dealing with dysfunctional teams

In my last post, I talked about how you identify a dysfunctional team you are part of. In this post, I want to discuss my experiences at dealing with one such team, and my efforts at changing the team being a member of the team. I had to resort to reading many books and my [...]